Consumers are becoming increasingly accustomed to downloading a wide variety of content from online venues, marketplaces, and content providers, onto personal and home entertainment devices. There are now many sites where users can download all types of content. As users become more familiar with downloading licensed content for which they are paying a fee, they will likely expect more convenience and flexibility from their purchases. For example, if a user downloads a movie or a video game, the user may want to watch the movie or play the game at different physical locations and not be limited to a device at home or to a few personal devices. Presently, a user is generally not able to take advantage of purchases in environments other than the one where the purchase was made. Over time, consumers will have higher expectations with respect to the content they purchased and may want to be able to play or execute the licensed content with more flexibility than is currently feasible.
Presently, there are different types of licenses available that provide various degrees of flexibility. For example, there are user-based licenses and node-lock licenses. Both these types of licenses lack the flexibility and convenience that users may expect. Floating licenses, more recently introduced, are somewhat more flexible. With floating licenses, for example, there may be 10 licenses for 50 users. One server has the license and 10 tokens which can be used by a certain number of people to execute or start the licensed content. The user essentially checks out a license token and returns it when she is done using the content. The devices that execute the content are “fixed” devices in that they do not move out of a specific network.
There are also licenses for both portable and stationary devices. However, the actual license servers are not portable. The currently available licensing schemes do not extend the convenience to the license holder to authorize a user to execute the licensed content on different devices in other networks.